Page:History of the Literature of Ancient Greece (Müller) 2ed.djvu/431

409 LITERATURE OF ANCIENT GREECE. 409 bona for the orator cut out of the rock, and around it some seats and other objects calculated to recal the recollection of the well-known place. Here sits the worthy Dicseopolis, a citizen of the old school, grumbling about his fellow citizens, who do not come punctually to the Pnyx, but lounge idly about the market-place, which is seen from thence ; for his own part, although he has no love for a town-life, with its bustle and gossip, he attends the assembly regularly in order to speak for peace. On a sudden the Prytanes come out of the council-house ; the people rush in ; a well-born Athenian, Amphitheus, who boasts of having been destined by the gods to conclude a peace with Sparta, is dismissed with the utmost contempt, in spite of the efforts of Dicrcopolis on his behalf ; and then, to the great delight of the Avar party, ambas- sadors are introduced, who have returned from Persia, and have brought with them a Persian messenger, " the Great King's eye," with his retinue : this forms a fantastic procession, which, as Aristophanes hints, is all a trick and imposture, got up by the demagogues of the war party. Other ambassadors bring a similar messenger from Sitalces, king of Thrace, on whose assistance the Athenians of the day built a great deal, and drag before the assembly a miserable rabble, under the name of picked Odomantian troops, which the Athenians are to take into their service for very high pay. Meanwhile Dicceopolis, seeing that he can- not turn affairs into another channel, has sent Amphitheus to Sparta on his own account ; the messenger returns in a few minutes with various treaties, (some for a longer, others for a shorter time,) in the form of wine-jars, like those which were used for pouring out libations on the conclusion of a treaty of peace ; Dieicopolis selects a thirty years' truce by sea and land, which does not smell of pitch and tar, like a short armistice in which there is only just time to calk the ships. All these delightful scenes are possible only in a comedy like that of the Athenians, which has its outward form for the representation of every relation, every function, and every character ; which is able to sketch everything in bold colours by means of grotesque speaking figures, and does not trouble itself with confining the activity of these figures to the laws of reality and the probabilities of actual life.* The first dramatic complication which Aristophanes introduces into his plot, arises from the chorus, which consists of Acharnians, i. e., the inhabitants of a large village of Attica, where the people gained a liveli- hood chiefly by charcoal-burning, the materials for which were supplied by the neighbouring mountain-forests : they are represented as rude, general, which went far beyond modern art in finding an outward expression for every thought and feeling of the mind, but fell short of our art in keeping up an appearance of consistency in the employment of these forms, as the laws of actual life would have required.
 * la all this, comedy docs but follow in its own way the spirit of ancient art in